You can see the headline now: "Shocking sex secrets Europe doesn't want you to know." The Daily Mail snarling at "meddling Euro judges", The Sun claiming Max Mosley had left free speech "bound and gagged". But it was not to be. Armageddon had been avoided, or so we are led to believe.

Conveniently ignored among the "chilling effect" quote-picking from yesterday's European court of human rights judgment on prior notification was a reaffirmation of Mosley as a "victim", and severe criticism of the News of the World for its "tawdry" breach of his article 8 right to privacy merely to "entertain and titillate" readers.

The rightwing press have abhorred the European convention on human rights, ever since they failed to stop the last Labour government enshrining it in Britain's legal system. So instead of an honest debate about whether Fleet Street has made a rod for its own back with regard to privacy, we have attention-diverting hysteria about freedoms of expression that were never really under threat.

While apparently a sacrosanct right in newspapers, the behaviour of rogue tweeters in outing superinjunctees was quickly seized on as beyond the pale of free speech. Quotes about how life had become a "nightmare" for falsely accused victims like Jemima Khan were wheeled out without irony by publications whose very lifeblood is speculation and innuendo. The whingeing was audible: you're on our turf, start playing by our rules.

Held aloft at the other end of the superinjunction spectrum was Big Brother star Imogen Thomas. While the papers ignored that for her modern breed of celebrity, anonymity is akin to death, she wept about being "thrown to the wolves" because of her famous lover's privacy bid.

Neither of these phenomena is at all new, but the desired effect is still achieved; the public was made to believe Britain's basic rights were under siege.

So when yesterday's judgment emerged from Strasbourg, Fleet Street united in gloating over a victory for free speech and investigative journalism. But any time the Guardian is singing from the same hymn sheet as the Daily Star, a second glance needs be cast.

Although another millionaire calling for tightened privacy law may do his cause more harm that good, MP Zac Goldsmith pierced through the red-top ploy. "It's not right that the really important examples like this [Trafigura] should be used as a cover by unscrupulous tabloids to demand a blank cheque to write whatever they want about anyone's private lives," he said.

In truth the public interest was at little risk of being trampled by Mosley's ECHR bid. What was in jeopardy is the right of tabloid editors to declare open season on whoever's private life they chose, safe in the knowledge that public interest could be squabbled over later on, once the cat was out of the bag.

"Such reporting does not attract the robust protection of Article 10 afforded to the press. As a consequence, in such cases, freedom of expression requires a more narrow interpretation," the judgment made clear.

The murkier end of our newspaper industry is riding parasitically on the back of legitimate concerns about the effect on investigative journalism of statutory prior notification, types of reporting they rarely, if ever, indulge in. The real scandal is that they'd much rather spend money on five-year-old pictures of Pippa Middleton in a bikini than apply their resources toward the very public interest they claim to hold so dear.

Then, after watching from the sidelines while the big boys played for keeps, the bumbling PCC entered the fray, wielding a tea towel in the direction of the Daily Telegraph for its "fishing expedition" in Lib Dem surgeries late last year, exposing an early fractures in the coalition.

For all its methodological flaws it was a story with more public interest, and arguably less dubious morality, than appears in most of the tabloids combined on any given day. I can't blame the Telegraph for feeling hard done by – like a kid caught with his hand in the sweet jar, while the rest of the gang have made a clean getaway with the cash register.